I just finished the audiobook of Adrian Goldsworthy’s Caesar, Life of a Collosus, and by far my biggest takeaway was how modern many of Caesar’s behaviors seem even from the distance of over two thousand years. A lot of that is because Caesar has set the standard against which all effective leaders (well, dictators) are judged. But Caesar wore many hats in addition to being a dictator. In fact, his time as a dictator took up only a few brief years before his life was literally cut short one morning in mid-March BC 54. His formative years were spent training as a religious cleric; he then transitioned to lawyering and politics during his twenties, and it was only when he headed north for an eight-year campaign against the Gauls that he became a full-time military leader, methodically winning glory for himself and Rome, presiding over the killing of an estimated one million enemy soldiers/civilians, and causing me to wonder….would Caesar have been a good high school English teacher in the twenty first century? 

Let’s define “good” as “competent enough to make a career out of it.” 

With that established, I do think Caesar, unlike many of his fellow Romans, would have very likely made a highly effective high school teacher. After listening to the twenty-four hour biography, I feel that I learned enough about ol’ Gaius to infer that, were he to be transported to a classroom setting in the twenty first century, he would be celebrated by his students, if occasionally cursed by his principals. That’s because much of the skills needed to succeed in education are as enduring as Caesar himself. He understood the value of goals, he knew how to treat his soldiers, and he understood how to publicize his achievement.  

Every day a teacher must make dozens of decisions that will in some way affect their subordinates (students). In college and at the beginning of every school year we are reminded of the value of fair, firm, and consistent actions. I’m not sure whether the mantra could be fully applied to Caesar, but he certainly showed a rigid pragmatism in his dealings with his army, his fellow Roman leaders, and his enemies. Goldsworthy consistently describes him as “amoral” in his decision-making. Raw emotions never played a part in deciding whether the citizens of a captured city were given clemency or massacred. The decision to spare captured Romans during the civil was always a matter of optics, not humanity. A less positive description of this mindset might be “cold blooded.” However, I think the positive way to look at it is “goal-oriented”. Caesar always did what he felt would best for himself (and, arguably, Rome) in the long-term. In education, it’s easy to get side-tracked by frustrations that affect your decision-making, whether it’s a failure in technology, a class unreceptive to a lesson, or an unproductive interaction with a student. While most effective educators have more egalitarian goals than Caesar, we could all use his attention to the big picture in making our day-to-day decisions, never letting the frustrations of the present control our actions in achieving our desired future.  

Decision-making is one thing, but what about how you treat the people who work under you? Enduring an arduous experience over an extended time period with a group of young adults — the Roman general and the high school teacher work with a similar clientele. Caesar was progressive in his treatment of soldiers, and I saw many parallels that translate to classroom management. Caesar did not just miraculously inspire devotion from his men — he understood that it was a process that requires meaningful leadership, and put the work in to earn that loyalty. Throughout his campaign in Gaul he made it a point to learn his soldiers’s names and throughout their adventures richly rewarded those who did well, often paying soldiers far more than what was expected at the time, pushing his own bank account into the red to do so. Caesar also made it a point to personally participate in the army’s training exercises, never asking them to do something he couldn’t do himself. In battle he was one of the few Roman generals who would (occasionally) fight on the front lines alongside his legions. In doing so he sacrificed the tactical view from his horse in the rear of the army but gained a huge morale boost for his army by swinging a sword alongside them. Caesar also rarely chose to employ the method of discipline by decimation, whereby one of every ten soldiers is chosen at random to be beaten to death by his cohort (talk about negative reinforcement!). It’s no surprise that by the time the eight-year campaign concluded in Gaul, most of the army was more loyal to their general than to their country and ready to stand alongside their general in the civil war against Pompey. As a teacher, Caesar would understand the value of learning student names as quickly as possible, the value of showing praise and publicly honoring achievement, the value of sparingly using negative reinforcement, and the value of suffering alongside your class, never asking them to show mastery of a skill that you aren’t able to model for them. I think there are analogous scenarios to decimation that take place in the classroom (punishing the entire class for the malfeasance of a few), and I think Caesar would have the sense enough to avoid it whenever possible.   

Leadership and achievement is all well good, but it’s not that valuable unless everyone knows about. While I was already familiar enough with Caesar’s genius at leadership before reading the book, I was not aware of his valuable skill in publicizing these achievements. During his campaigns he was consistently writing letters to his friends in Rome, as well as composing a detailed narrative of each year’s success, which were eagerly read back by his friends and political enemies at home each spring. In doing so Caesar always controlled the narrative of his time away from the city, and he made sure no one forgot about the glory he was winning for Rome. It’s hard to imagine being away from home for eight years while still being a notable person. Was Caesar bragging in writing these dispatches? For sure. Was it effective? It was. As teachers I think we are always more apt to reflect on what doesn’t work than publicly share our triumphs. As self-aggrandizing as it may feel, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with writing about what works in your classroom. If shared publicly, it not only makes you look good (or at least proud of your work), but it also raises the public image of the school and its students. It could also spark ideas in fellow teachers (I see this a lot with my wife’s teacher Instagram, where other music teachers borrow her ideas and activities). And, as Caesar proved when he was able to illegally march back into Rome with his army and meet no resistance, there’s nothing more valuable than controlling the narrative.   

While I do think Caesar would make a fantastic high school teacher, there would obviously be areas in which he would need to adapt. For example, when he was interacting with people he viewed as wasting his time, his temper sometimes got the best of him. Patience is a vital skill in education. Indeed, much of Caesar’s risk-taking behavior embodies the adage “do first, ask forgiveness later” (or simply conquer the people from whom you would ask forgiveness). Caesar would have to quickly learn the limits of that principle if he wanted a long career as an educator. Also, on a more mundane note, he would need to make sure his classes were always prepared to handle him in the event he suffered a seizure…soft mats and wooden spoons and whatnot. With all that being said, I am indeed confident that Caesar would make a phenomenal teacher. He would be pleased to teach a diverse student body (he was in the process of diversifying the Senate when he was assassinated) and he would be delighted that during the month named after him, he would not have to work at all.